Least Bittern Needing Help

I've only seen this species once. I grabbed several frames of him out of the car window at Anahuac NWR in April, and posted one shortly thereafter. That one had a somewhat busy background, as is often the case with bitterns, but it was passable without much manipulation. I liked the pose of this frame, at 95% of FF, but the criss-crossed sticks the background were extremely distracting. So I've resorted to extreme measures to try and push the bg back. I'm not totally happy with the result, but don't know what else to do short of pasting in a different BG. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

D7000, 700mm, ISO 800, 1/1600s @ f/7.1 manual.

Just to give you an idea where I started from, this is straight out of the camera, just converted and resized.

Nice detail on this one. Glad to see Anahuac coming back from the hurricane. I find the shadow on the neck a bit distracting without seeing what's causing it.

I could use a wide array of expletives to describe the masterfully done pp work. It truly is amazing how well you pushed the dry foreground reeds to the BG giving a 3D quality. Love how you brought his richness, detail back in such harsh light. I would say you're a top contender for best pp work.




Geoffrey

Hello Bill, love the bittern and know where they live from photographing a couple myself (but not the Least Bittern). I like the original better, it is the environment the bird lives in, to find one in the open is rare.

That's some incredible PP work, Bill. I would never have guessed that there was this much work done. How did you treat the BG?
Nice alert pose and sharpness.

Great PP. work, Bill!!!!!!! After you have done all that work removing the shadow from the neck should be an easy one.

Well done Bill :S3:

Yes some hard work there Bill
Worked as well !!
Excellent.
JohnR

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Originally Posted by Sidharth Kodikal

That's some incredible PP work, Bill. I would never have guessed that there was this much work done. How did you treat the BG?
Nice alert pose and sharpness.

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Thanks Sid. I can't remember everything I did to this. I worked on it a few months ago, and gave up when I didn't like the result. I revisited it the other day, deciding the pose was too good to abandon, so I built on what I had done previously. All in all, interventions on the BG included heavy S/H tool to tone down the bright sticks; heavy NR; lowered contrast to near zero; low-opacity brush to paint a green wash over the entire BG, which further toned down the grey sticks; some Gaussian blur. And of course, cloned out the sticks that were passing in front of the bird. That's all I can recall, but maybe other stuff too.

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Originally Posted by Alan Murphy

Nice detail on this one. Glad to see Anahuac coming back from the hurricane. I find the shadow on the neck a bit distracting without seeing what's causing it.

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Thank you Alan. I'm not sure myself what's causing the shadow. It doesn't look to me like it came from one of the elements I removed. In any case, I've taken a stab at removing it.

Now you have a perfect image, Bill. I wish it were mine. Again, great PP. technics.